IAM Programs Should Strive for Four 9’s

IAM Programs Should Strive for Four 9’s

04.4.2017

Millions of dollars and sometimes even lives are at stake for healthcare facilities and organizations whose networks are not up and running.

Web hosting services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are critical to any company’s daily operations, their applications and end users. They tout 99.9% reliability and one way they achieve this is by providing redundant services. But even in redundant systems, the unexpected happens.

For example, there have been several instances where even the redundancies put in place by Amazon and Azure have failed. DDoS attacks, like the one that targeted Dynamic Network Services Inc., better known as Dyn, affected service for customers of both small and large enterprises like Twitter, Spotify and GitHub. Most recently, human error caused AWS to go down when a single wrongly-entered command was performed during debugging. Human error has also affected Azure customers in the past when they mistakenly enabled code in the production environment and in the pre-production environment. Oops.

So when evaluating your identity access management program, the question to ask yourself is, “Can I do better than the 99.9% availability uptime level my web service provider offers?”

The short answer is yes. Just as these web service providers provide redundancy with their services, you can add redundancy with your web service providers. For example, if you have an Azure instance in the east and west of North America, add another instance on AWS.

Contact us to learn how Optimal IdM offers its customers service level agreements with 99.99% uptime by bridging between Azure and AWS.